🏛️-Maps visualising asset condition over time

If you have a number of buildings over a campus, or over a wider area, one way of getting an overview of your assets condition is by displaying the changing of the condition over time.

When looking at a building there is, in simplistic terms, the outside and the inside.

The condition of both will depend on the materials it is built with, their durability and maintenance requirements. You build with cheaper materials, they are going to wear more readily and require more maintenance. You build with more durable materials and these will require less maintenance but their capital cost will be higher. In a tax environment that does not allow for cost breaks for more durable materials but will allow tax deductions for maintenance, there is an incentive to build cheap and spend on maintenance (as it gets tax deductions).

Outside materials will degrade based on wear and tear of the use of the building plus weathering and other environmental factors based on its geographical location. Snow, frost, wind, dust, heat, UV radiation etc and of course cleaning regime and maintenance.

Inside materials will usually degrade based on wear and tear, cleaning regime and maintenance.

Different materials will degrade and need repairing at different rates. An internal paint finish to a wall has a baseline of about 10-15 years depending on its exposure to wear and tear (the main corridor (high traffic flow) to a single office (low traffic flow)). A brick wall will have a baseline of 50 to 100 years.

Risk of failure on elements is also a consideration. Coffee spilled onto a wall will mar its finish and be unsightly but will not affect the function of the space. A leaking roof in winter could cause fabric damage in ceilings walls and floor finishes as well as causing electrical and data failure thereby affecting the function of the space below in that it becomes unusable until repairs take place. So some elements have a more catastrophic consequence from their failures than others.

A good way to manage these different issues is to show external and internal information in different formats.

For external information relating to condition, you can use maps. For internal condition, you can use Filterable Excel Spreadsheets with conditions.

For external issues, we usually have only a few elements, external walls, doors, windows, and roofs.

Condition over time. Interactive data visualization

If you have a baseline of an element or finish, an estimate of its current condition along that spectrum and a date then you can work out when a specific element or condition will need to be checked to see if it needs replacing at its predicted end of life. Usually, there is the standard estimate of an element/finish life, a low baseline will be less based on minimal maintenance of that element/finish during its life and an upper limit based on an element/finish that has been maintained well.

Maps displaying condition. Presentation of data and information

If you have condition information on your assets then we can analyse the data and transform it into a prediction tool that you can visualise changing over time. Refer to this example of 3 buildings changing external condition over time.

About

My current area of interest is in exploring Asset & Facilities Management tools based on capturing information at Design/Construction phase for use throughout the life of the building. Tools I am using are open-source or common programmes to allow maximum accessibility to the information both in geometric and data format.

This has dropped me into the world of programming HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, VBA, PHP & AJAX to name but a few distractions.